


a scientist is always fine

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [28]
Category: Do No Harm (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst with a He's On The Right Track Ending, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Or like happy-ish, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23700409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: There is absolutely nothing going wrong in Ruben's life right now, which makes it the perfect time for his recovery to start falling to pieces.
Relationships: Ruben Marcado/Usnavi (In the Heights)/Vanessa (In the Heights)
Series: less than ninety degrees [28]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/713601
Comments: 31
Kudos: 19





	a scientist is always fine

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: This is entirely about Ruben's PTSD going through a bad stage, so expect the usual warnings for detailed talk about trauma, general mental health stuff, some discussion of violence/assault (though it is mostly aftermath/injuries rather than description of the event itself), a very vague mention of sexual assault, very brief mention of suicidal feelings. 
> 
> Takes place probably a month or so after they move in together.

It’s as simple as a pile of mail on the table. Ruben’s payslip and an Amazon package for Vanessa and a bundle of letters forwarded to Usnavi by the new tenant in his old apartment. Ruben Marcado, Vanessa García, Usnavi De la Vega. Ruben smiles down at their three names all together on the table, his heart aching with adoration, thinks about how their letters all arrive in the same mailbox in their apartment that they share and is breathless with joy, with disbelief, with—oh. With actual breathlessness.

The panic attack lasts for over two hours, and resurges twice in the evening before he passes out on the couch from exhaustion.

Things do not improve much from there.

***

The subject reports overwhelming fear in the form of sunbeams catching against the dishes on the drying rack in a way that makes it impossible to ignore their existence, impossible to ignore that these dishes are from a breakfast he shared with the two people he lives with where they all smiled at each other and felt comfortable and content and at home. The subject reports physical pain as a result of touching the side of the bookshelf and being intensely aware that the nerve receptors transmitting the feeling of varnished wood from fingertip to conscious thought are his own. The subject reports waking up in the middle of the night and hiding in the spare room because the two people who he shares a bed with love him and for the first time ever he understands that this is terrible.

The subject reports that the clock reads 8:25 and he is going to die. The subject reports that the clock reads 10:00 and his plane is delayed and he is going to die. The subject reports that every time he thinks about the mail, their mail, in their shared mailbox and on their shared kitchen table, he is going to die.

***

It’s as simple as repetition. Fall down, recover, struggle forwards, fall down, recover, struggle. Struggle. Wake up, live, wake up. Ruben feels like he has never really slept.

He breathes out exhaustedly, sending a ripple over the surface of his coffee, and pretends he doesn’t notice Vanessa and Usnavi glancing at each other. Briefly, he entertains the idea that maybe everything would be better if only he was inclined to music instead of science. He probably could have written really good songs about it. It could have been a beautiful coping mechanism that was so much easier to share with people and be understood. It could have been all instrumental, no lyrics. Even science is choked down into bias by the need for _words_.

***

The irony is not lost on him that he lives two consciousnesses in one physical form, split right down the middle and never wholly present. Out of body, or out of time. Out of body he watches dispassionately, waiting for signs of recovery. Out of time he lives it in present tense, always the first time, every time. He is both sides of a study constantly tested. As a researcher, he would like to stress that this is good practice: validity is largely a matter of repetition, observation, charting patterns and patterns disrupted. As a research subject, he would like to stress that it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts: trauma is largely a matter of repetition without the objectivity.

***  
The immediate and/or ongoing aftermath of the incident is as follows:

Knife wounds, [32]  
\- of which [21] required stitches  
\- of which [9] healed atypically leaving hypertrophic scarring  
Low grade fever, indicative of infection  
Severe contusions on the face, ribs, and legs as a result of blunt force  
Minor temporary damage to the throat as a result of strangulation  
Minor nerve damage in right hand, likely permanent  
Disordered eating leading to  
\- malnutrition  
\- dehydration  
\- excessive weight loss  
Frequent headaches  
Chest pains  
Stomach pains  
Impaired intellectual function  
Impaired sexual function  
Insomnia  
Fatigue  
Nightmares  
Panic attacks  
Anxiety  
Hallucinations  
Depression  
Dissociation  
Flashbacks  
Thoughts of suicide/self-harm  
\- in passing  
\- plans made, with the intention of being acted on (no attempts)

The researcher would like it on record that a list, emotionless and factual, is the best way to make sense of the world.

*******

Vanessa comes up behind him with enough noisy forewarning that it doesn’t make him jump, and she says, “y’know, some people like knitting.”

It’s enough of a non-sequitur that it pulls Ruben’s focused gaze to frown at her. “What are you talking about?”

“As a hobby. You could make a sweater, instead of doing this.” She indicates the door, where he’s been standing vigil at the peephole watching the hallway outside their apartment for...he isn’t sure how long for. Or how long he spent doing the same thing yesterday. “Ruben, this isn’t normal.”

“I’ve never been normal,” Ruben says, returning his gaze to the peephole. He expects there to be someone there, a dark figure in distorted fish-eye view catching him in the few seconds he dropped his guard, but there is nobody.

“I meant this isn’t even normal for _you_.”

This surprises him: it’s hardly something new, after all. Or, well, it isn’t new to him. Vanessa wasn’t there in the hotel in Jamaica or when he lived back at Ma’s house and she wasn’t there the first several months of living in New York. To him, this is only a return to what feels natural, as though all the recovery in between and all the life before it was necessary was the anomaly and there was never a time when this kind of thing wasn’t exactly what he was meant to be doing.

She sighs into his silence and says, “just come sit with us for a while, honey.”

“I will soon,” he says, and then he doesn’t.

*******

The subject reports nightmares. Nightmares that wake him up, nightmares that wake all of them up, nightmares that happen while he isn’t even asleep.

The subject reports nightmares of the way that blood smells in hot air and the feeling of water over fully-clothed skin. Nightmares about planes and cars and hotels and lights and dark and of dying and of surviving. Bleeding out on the floor while his loved ones watch and do nothing, or watch and shout in horror, or watch and know they’re next, it’s coming for them next. About him watching them bleed out on the floor and knowing that he is next, or that he is never and will have to live with the guilt and the grief for a long and empty life.

Nightmares in which he is still working at Independence Memorial and Ian never finds out who he is and he continues to work on Blackout for Jason forever because there is no reason for him to ever run away to Jamaica or New York. His life in Philadelphia is long and it is empty.

The subject reports nightmares of Ian leaning over him and instead of cutting him open only kissing him, gently and sincerely on the mouth. The subject reports nightmares that sometimes he kisses back.

*******

“I don’t think I ever got so scared that I actually threw up,” Usnavi says, in a confessional tone as though that makes him the weirdest one sitting on this bathroom floor.

“Wouldn’t recommend it,” Ruben says weakly.

“There’s a lot you never told us, ain’t there?” Usnavi doesn’t sound like he expects an answer. He taps lightly against the tile, the faintest clack of short and bitten fingernails. It would usually be annoying, but right now it only sounds like rain. “Like, we know the _events_ , but not – you never told us why you hate us touching your chest. Or what you were doing while you lived out in Jamaica. Or...or how you felt, when it was actually happening.”

“You can probably take a guess.” He spits bile-flavored saliva into the toilet bowl and rests his forehead against the seat, hygiene be damned.

“That ain’t my point.” Out of the corner of his eye he can see Usnavi’s head move. “My point is you haven't _talked_ about it.”

He has no argument. “I can feel you looking at me. You said you wouldn’t look.”

“Lo siento, querido.” Usnavi turns his head away.

Ruben closes his eyes and considers saying, in a voice that will probably be far too loud at first before it cracks in the centre and comes out more broken, that how it felt more than anything was _humiliating_. That he was on the brink of his own death and mostly how he felt at the time was embarrassed, and he only remembered to be terrified later and then never really stopped.

He thinks about saying this, and then he doesn’t.

*******

The nature of the incident could be described as:

Torture  
Kidnapping  
Attempted murder  
Assault  
Assault with an additional modifier which the researcher emphatically does not acknowledge because he doesn't know if it's applicable and if it is then that makes things even more complicated than they already are  
Something they haven’t created a term for because it is too personal and specific to the researcher to ever be defined  
Something that could have been easily avoided if only the researcher was:  
\- more intelligent  
\- stronger, physically  
\- stronger, mentally  
\- a different, better person 

The researcher would like it on record that there were probably specific accusations at the trial, legal definitions of terms which may be available to any interested parties, which he has not sought out himself. The researcher does not recall the majority of the trial, only that he broke down in hysterics when the defense asked why he didn’t just ask for help on the plane, and that Paola _screamed_ with rage through tears in the hallway after the verdict, and that Jason did not cry at all.

*******

Ruben tries to observe Vanessa, on the fire escape in the July sun. Mostly he just stares at her. She doesn’t seem to mind, which may skew results. Research participants should not wink at the researcher, even if they don’t know they’re being researched. It makes the whole thing seem much sexier than he meant it to, and sends his thoughts off down distracting paths.

He thinks about writing _I am looking to see if I am afraid of our life together_ , about writing _I am looking to see if the catalyst is regret._ He thinks about writing what he imagines her skin would taste like unedited, without the usual interference from perfume and shampoo and shower gel. The sweat, the smiles, the stretchmarks on her thighs and breasts that remind him of fainter versions of his scars, both of them grown into their silver spiderwebbed skins. The faint white mark just under her navel where she told him she once had a piercing, age fifteen, mostly to see her mom freak out, and then it got infected and she had to take it out.

He thinks about writing that he wishes he could sink into her sinews and reverse time so that he could feel what it was like to be in her body and her mind through the whole messy process of becoming Vanessa. That she is perfectly ordinary and it makes him crazy to think about the fact that, like everyone, at one point she wasn’t anything at all and and now she is so many, many things, and he wishes she had taken more detailed notes on the process it took to get there because now he has no way to truly understand her, but he tries anyway.

He doesn’t really want to make notes but he tries anyway. Gets as far as writing _the subject_ , which he crosses it out immediately because he can use that word for himself but never for her. He writes, _Vanessa_ , and then closes his notebook because that seems like the only important thing to say.

So much for observation.

*******

God knows why he’d expected anything more scientifically conclusive from watching Usnavi. Usnavi is a challenge to the notion that a key feature of living organisms is _organization **.**_ It’s hard to imagine even the configuration of Usnavi’s molecules as anything other than utter chaos.

He passes over a dishtowel while Usnavi licks the trail of spilled orange juice making its sticky way up his arm, and doesn’t even think to make any notes. Instead, he says, “you make my heart do medically concerning things.”

Usnavi _radiates_ at him. It is so improbable that Ruben cares so much about that smile. It is so improbable that Ruben cares so much about a complex stack of atoms in a juice-stained tank top. Usnavi is just a localized collection of chemical reactions in the unfathomably vast system of constantly interacting variables that make up the world around them. It is so wildly unlikely that any of them care about anything. Ruben doesn’t know why it _matters_ so much that one time two and a half years ago someone made him strip to nothing and then put a knife to his skin. Ruben doesn’t know why it matters that he’s started looking at things like their shared dishtowels or their toothbrush cup or their stupid giant bed and feeling like his lungs have been crushed. It feels a bit like he’s shattered into microscopic component pieces that are now being reabsorbed into the fabric of an ambivalent universe.

It does not, however, feel like falling out of love.

*******

The researcher would like it on record that a post-traumatic stress response is not in itself an unhealthy one. It is only when it fails to fade as expected over time that it becomes so. The system malfunctions in the processing and the event fails to be assigned to the category of _past_ to be filed away in the long-term memory. When triggered, the event is not experienced as a memory but as a _now,_ and the distance of time is unable to heal because to the subject there is no distance. The stress response is not all that inappropriately heightened if one takes into account that the subject experiencing it does not always exist in the same chronological moment as those around them. From their perspective, it is not all that inappropriate to feel the need to scream.

PTSD is less a disorder of anxiety, and more so a disorder of time.

*******

They’ve started asking permission before they hug him which is a thing he hasn’t needed so regularly since back before they were dating. He thinks, inevitably, of a panic attack in a bodega, and Usnavi’s face when Ruben first told him, and Vanessa’s when she first saw.

When they speak to him it’s so much more careful than they have grown to be. The amount of painkillers in the first aid box is always less than a single sleeve, far below a lethal dose, and he doesn’t know where they hid the rest. He thinks, inevitably, of his mother, and the way she started compulsively checking the cabinets were locked before she left him home alone, and the funeral he wishes he knew more about, and he breathes like they really did bury him long ago.

Get far enough down the timeline and even the act of avoiding triggers becomes a trigger. It’s very likely he’s the only one who finds that as funny as it is.

Usnavi cuts off a sentence halfway through as Ruben enters the living room. He says “oh, uh, I better go now, thanks, this helped,” and ends the call he's on. Ruben would think very little of it except that not ten minutes later he gets a text from Ma reminding him that he has people who care about him and want to help him. The phrasing is falsely casual, acting like anyone has ever said something like that without it having layers of a deep and barely hidden concern. They were talking to each other about it. They were talking to each other about him.

He goes to the spare room and stays there for six hours and 32 minutes.

*******

Sometimes Ruben thinks the greatest barrier to progress is nothing more than the people working on it making things so much harder than they need to. He’s found so often in research that it’s in looking over the early material again, looking back to the very basics after weeks of increasingly complicated research, that most answers are found. The simplicity of titanium as the platform for the kill drug. What else could it possibly be? The simplicity of a lipophilic GABA receptor inhibitor, an evening of coma and a clear head in the morning. How did nobody get there before him?

He doesn’t know, sometimes, how other people can think that what he does is clever. The answers are all already there.

“We’re worried about you, hermoso,” Usnavi says outside the spare room door.

“I know,” he says, too quiet to be heard.

Ruben isn’t clever. He’s a precocious child playing at scientist. Dissociation dressed up in a costume party labcoat, plastic Erlenmeyer flasks full of brightly colored water, inert and non-reactive. Ruben is clouded by bias and false objectivity. Ruben needs to stop lying to himself. The answers were all already there, they were there all along. It’s just a matter of letting yourself see them.

The problem is that he’s _happy_. He has so much to lose now that he didn’t have to lose before. The catalyst was only a sudden and brief glimpse of what it feels like to be really alive, really awake, really free, neither detached nor bleeding. The catalyst is the future that he has lying in front of him that he so desperately doesn’t want to lose, not to his own mind or to Jason’s manipulation or Ian’s violence. The mail on the table. The safety in his home. For the first time in his recovery, he’s truly aware that there are _stakes._

He doesn’t like what he knows he needs to do next. It feels like a step backwards. But as in science, so in recovery: a matter of grinding through repetition with minor improvements each cycle.

“Ruben, please,” Vanessa says. There’s no lock on the spare room. They could just let themselves in, but that isn’t the agreement on how the spare room works.

“I know,” Ruben says, this time loud enough to be heard. “I’ll be out soon, I’ll explain, I promise. I just need to finish this.”

 _All evidence,_ he writes in his notebook, _indicates a relapse._

Then he hides under the desk with his head on his knees for a further 43 minutes before he goes to talk to Usnavi and Vanessa about it, because sometimes that’s what science is, too.

***

“I might be a mess afterwards,” he warns them, in case they want to leave before they have to deal with that. _He_ wants to leave. He already would have done, if they weren’t here.

“Yes, that’s why we came with you, dumbass,” Vanessa says.

“You sure you don’t want us to come in there with you?” Usnavi asks, and Ruben shakes his head.

“I think that would make it so much harder,” he admits, just as his name is called. He turns to Usnavi and Vanessa one more time, and says, hesitantly, “if—if I’m, if it seems bad, when I come out...please don’t look at me?”

They both nod in solemn unison. It’s the only thing that stops him running for the doors and sprinting all the way home.

The room that he is shown to is lit dimmer than a hospital, brighter than a bedroom. The woman in the seat has hair almost exactly the same color as Jason’s but her face is friendly and her eyes are hazel. She looks right at him when she introduces herself, and he looks at the carpet as he takes a seat so he doesn’t have to acknowledge her looking.

She doesn’t try to shake his hand, and she says, “so, Ruben, let’s have a little talk about what brings you to therapy.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please, please comment if you liked it! Thank you!


End file.
